☠⚠⚡☔☣☢☹⛈ Windows 8...

Got myself Win8 for €30 (upgrade from a old Student-for-Free Vista license I never used, instead of €150 it looked like a bargain). My normal computer went bad, and I'm playing with a replacement device while waiting for replacement parts to arrive.

http://www.heise.de/ct/schlagseite/2013/1/

This Metro-bathroom-tiles stuff is so incredibly distracting when you want to do real work. Click on a mp3 file, ... *BAM!* fullsceen mp3 player (how could I ever live without such a thing. I mean, music players are meant to get your full attention while reproducing the music). Add a printer? *BAM!* Fullscreen "Add a device" app.

The builtin graphics drivers of the rather old Nvidia Quadro always crash when trying to accellerate video decode. There's a third party tool to turn it off, recommended frequently because it seems to be pretty normal that video accelleration crashes, with a lot of different graphics cards. One of my soundcards is no longer supported, the other one (M-Audio Delta 44) has the usual fucked-up drivers all "Pro Audio" gear has, because all these companies universally employ morons to do the programming who eventually just pick lame excuses out of their ... Oh my, I'm angry..

Apparently "Skype" is now built in. But: It refuses to let you use it without converting your "old" skype account into a "Windows live ID". And I learned that the new bathroom-tile-version doesn't do file-transfer. WTF?!

Sorry, Microsoft, I really wanted to try out this new thing and tried to be open about it, but you made usability for non "grandma got a tablet PC for Christmas" users really abysmally bad, I'm quite frustrated after only a few hours of light use.

And I cannot understand how this usage paradigm of full-screen apps should map to people doing actual work, instead of browsing the web and playing with facebook. And I cannot understand why it cannot be disabled completely (with tile-apps running in a window, for example).

When the parts for my other PC (the motherboard apparently went bad the last few weeks, with LAN and SATA controller deteriorating) arrive tomorrow or on monday, I'm pretty sure what OS I'll NOT install.

Betty Remote

A friendly colleague gave me a Betty Remote. It's a marvelous device as a dirt-cheap ARM7 (LPC2200) eval board and flashing worked so far, JTAG not. I have the wrong toolchain to compile the firmware, and the keyboard matrix seems to be broken (registers random wrong key presses). :-(

From chris' blog

From chris' blog

Note: Archlinux on the Toradex T20

Update (November 2016): Archlinux on the Toradex T20 (with Archlinux' kernel)

A lot of people got hold of a Toradex T20 board which was given away in exchange to a €20 donation to the red cross (if I remember correctly).

To get Archlinux running quickly on the T20 running the rootfs from a micro-sd card (kernel stays on internal NAND flash, so does the toradex firmware):

• Get the ARMv7 Tegra2 TrimSlice root filesystem and put it on a micro-sd card (first partition, create a ext4 filesystem for it).
• Getl the T20_LinuxImageV2.0Alpha2_20121019.tar.bz2 from Toradex, put the T20 module into recovery mode and install the linux-image as prescribed on Toradex' website.
• Boot the T20 board, interrupt the boot sequence. Add the following two environment variables to the u-boot bootloader:

setenv myargs ip=off root=/dev/mmcblk0p1 rootfstype=ext4 rootflags=data=writeback,commit=15

setenv myboot run setup\; setenv bootargs \${defargs} \${myargs} \${mtdparts} \${setupargs}\; echo Booting from NAND...\; nboot ${loadaddr} 0 ${lnxoffset} \&\& bootm

• Run your image.

run myboot

• If you are satisfied with the result, save this modification with...

setenv bootcmd run myboot

saveenv